Is Your Product a “Gym Membership” Product?
This is another post about “later-stage customer development”.
You’ve probably heard the “medicine vs. vitamin” analogy of products — that is, to maximize your chances at success, it’s easier to sell medicine (that fix a specific, painful ill) than vitamins (that offer a vague promise of ‘feeling better’).
But I’ve realized there’s another category of product – the “gym membership” product:
- Your customers have accepted that they have a problem they really want to deal with (even if it’s not ‘life-or-death’).
- Of course there’s a free alternative, and some people get along just fine using it, but most people need the accountability, the support, and the motivation of a paid solution.
- Some people will use it religiously every day, some will use it once a week, and some will use it gung-ho for a week and then peter out for a few months.
- Some people will actually never use it, even though they keep paying you. They’ll kind of resent you for it, though.
- There are a lot of different ways to use it to meet your goals. Some people walk in full of purpose, and know exactly how they need to use it.
- Most people need suggestions on how to use it effectively. Otherwise they use it poorly or just wander around aimlessly. They’ll be unsatisfied and rate you poorly.
- But if you force people through a long “initiation” session, they’ll find that obnoxious.
- Once people feel comfortable using it, they’ll find it gives them a lot more energy. They’ll wonder how they ever got along without it!
You could also call these aspirational products. We sign up because we want to be that kind of person.
Unlike most products — where the first and biggest challenge is getting people to give a damn enough to give you five seconds of their attention — it isn’t that big a challenge to get people to sign up. They see the equivalent of “better body in 90 days” and that’s enough to get them to click.
The challenge is getting people to get started and come back. To do that, you have to anticipate and answer customer questions. And the more subtly you do this, the more your app will feel intuitive/”just works”/delightful.
These are the first two questions that I’m trying to answer right now for both KISSmetrics and KISSinsights.
Question 1: What do I do first?
You probably have a pretty good sense for, in an ideal world, what you wish your customers would do first in order to get the most value out of your product. However, you may be wrong. This is where, now that you’re in later-stage customer development, it can be tremendously useful to walk someone through using your product the way you think it should be used.
One of two things is likely to happen: they’ll say, “oh, that makes sense – why doesn’t the app tell me I should start by doing that?” or they’ll say “that doesn’t make sense – why can’t I do X first?”
For KISSmetrics, we heard a lot more of the former, so we built a first-user experience designed to tell you how you should start. Of course, we’re continuing to realize that there’s a lot more the app could be “telling” people, so we continue to tweak. For KISSinsights, I suspect the latter is more accurate, which means we’ll need to make bigger changes to the first-user experience.
Question 2: How are other people using it?
I think this question really encompasses three things: “I want proof that other people are actually getting value from this”, “I want to see how much trouble they had to go through to get results”, and just plain curiosity.
I posted some examples for KISSinsights, which seems to have been a big help already (judging by the number of emails I’ve gotten since then).
One thing I’m still pondering, though — how do you identify the “goes to the gym every day” customer vs. the “tries to make it once or twice a week” customer, when they’ve just started to use your product?
Dealing with these questions has meant a very different kind of customer interview. I wrote before that I was wary of telling the customer “here’s our product and here’s how you should use it” – now I think the way to think about it might be:
“Traditional” product development: “Let me tell you about us”
Early-stage customer development: “Tell me about you”
Later-stage customer development: “Let me tell you about other people like you“
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